postcards of the hanging

what’s the story autumn glory

Tonight (January 3rd) it is raining here in Davis. It’s the first proper rain in ages, it feels like. Of course all I’m worried about is whether the city fields will get closed for our soccer practice this weekend (I hope not). It’s been a pretty dry spell. But that is now. My lack of posting sketches lately means I am still going back in time, this time back to mid-November, when the trees outside Hutchison at UC Davis were ablaze with oranges and reds. A lot has happened in the world since then. The Last Jedi came out, for example. I’ve seen it twice, and need a third time to really get my feel for it, but I will delay discussing it here until that third viewing, but not because I want to approach it like a conscientious and objective critic, but because I want to wait until I have some Last Jedi Lego sketches to go with it (and yes, I have some Last Jedi Lego, the old Luke and Rey training set (with a Porg) is sat on top of the scanner right now). So sorry, it’s going to have to wait. It doesn’t feel right to post about it under a picture of some trees from a month and a half ago. But what can I talk about instead? Foliage? I could talk technique I guess. For this sketch, I actually added the paint first, and then added pen lines over the top. Whoah there Scully, what the fuh? Since when was that a thing you do? Well you know what sometimes I like to mix it up a bit, live a little, not just do exactly the same thing over and over like a scratched record. I’ve not done it since (I’m not that adventurous you know) but I did take a couple of pics at the time wile sketching that I thought you might like to see, below. It’s not exactly a ‘step-by-step’ but it’s to the point. Maybe some day I will do more ‘step-by-step’ type posts, even a video or two, but those usually slow me down a lot, which is why I never think to do them. Now at the October ‘Let’s Draw Davis’ sketchcrawl (have I posted about that yet? I’m so behind!) I did do a little sketching demo for the gathered group of sketchers before the ‘crawl began, demonstrating how to sketch a fire hydrant. When I say ‘demo’ I mean like an example of how I do it, not like a protest march with banners and stuff, though I would do that too.

Speaking of ‘how-to’, I was looking at the reviews of my 2nd book, “Five-Minute Sketching People” on the Amazon, most of them are very nice (thank you!) and I mentioned before that 1-star review (yeah cheers for that), well I noticed a newer 2-star review, that contained the following sentence:

“The author’s explanations are so boring, by the time he gets to the point you already forgot what he was talking about“.

Wow! It’s like they know me! That is totally what I am like in real life. Not on my blog of course (sarcasm emoji). The irony is that this is a review of my writing when edited down into very short, bite-size chunks. For example, “Contour means outline, so start by simply sketching someone as a basic silhouette“, as seen on page 82 in the US printed version. Now in the full unexpurgated Pete at 2am* version you would get “Contour, your basic contour, means outline, like a line that is outside the thing, not the Thing like Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four (the super hero team not the German hip-hop group Die Fantastischen Vier) (in case you were wondering), so start simply sketching someone slowly as a subtle simplified smart silhouette structure**. When I say contour, I don’t mean like the big bird thing that lives in the Andes…” etc etc. (* I did actually write a lot of that book at 2am) (** Did you spot all the alliteration in the final sentence of the original version? That’s all that Anglo-Saxon poetry I used to read, clearly).

But that’s a brilliant line isn’t it, “The author’s explanations are so boring, by the time he gets to the point you already forgot what he was talking about“. Honestly, geezer has no idea; he should listen to me talk about Germanic Philology. Or read any of my more nonsensical going-on-about-nothing blog posts (like this one, or this one, or any post where I talk about “A Street”, or this very blog post you’ve just read) (hello if you are still here!) (hello again if you are that person!). My mate from London said yeah, he should try going out for a drink with me; mm cheers for that, cheeky beggar. Admittedly many of our conversations in Camden Town’s establishments have tended to go in all sorts of directions. The Good Mixer. The Elephant’s Head. Doing impressions of Michael Caine playing Han Solo. What was I talking about again? Damn, I’ve forgotten…